Mother America

I also included elements I could glean from The Last Vial, a book written by the same author.

The world in 2013 is peacable. The Cold War is still nominally going on, but the age of gesturing with nukes or sponsoring coups and dictators or firing off bioweapons is long gone. While each of the three superpowers maintains that their system is best, they get along fairly well, and in many respects aren't enormously dissimilar. The United States has a more planned economy than its capitalist face says, and the communes of China have more individual involvement than Absolute Collectivity technically allows. Most competition these days is over economic success, scientific achievement, and of course eugenics.

The three Super Powers are the United States, the Soviet Union and China. America has some 500 million inhabitants, and you need a licence to have a child, and it has to be reviewed if you want another, except in Alaska where obtaining a licence entitles you to two children. Similarly, in the rest of the United States, after having contributed two children to the national gene pool, women are compulsorily sterilised, whereas this is only the case after having had four children in Alaska. A formidable bureaucracy ensures no-one can get away with an illegal birth. Many women, knowing their capacity to find a suitable man is limited, and knowing they want they have few chances to get parenthood right choose to go the path of artificial insemination. It is not considered unusual for an American mother to give birth to her prescribed two children, their anonymous father chosen by a board of scientists for his genetic suitability, then get married to a man she loves, never have any children with him and he raises her children as his own. Some people are concerned by this development, and have pointed out that genetic suitability doesn't necessarily produce model citizens if a mother is forced to bring up two children on her own. And some couples who have been analysed and measured to have excellent gene pairings are allowed to have more babies.

Eugenics is a science practised all over the world these days. It is no longer a racial creed, with suitable individuals usually selected for specific traits. Indeed due to the numbers of women choosing to be inseminated, there are many more racially mixed Americans than in our world. The reason for this obsession with good genes? Back in 1962, having lost face to the United States, the Soviet Union (or rather, renegade Soviet generals) unleashed an engineered form of flu. Rather than killing, this flu carried a pathogen that attacked the gametes, rendering the victim sterile. When this was discovered it took months to engineer a cure, and the world was brought over the brink of war (not nuclear thank God) until those responsible were apprehended.

The American government made it policy to keep citizen's sperm on stand-by as it was found that women were less affected by the flu whereas almost all men infected suffered sterility. The American government encourage a programme of restoring the population by giving subsidies to large families. While the American population dipped significantly in the 70s, it jumped up dramatically in the 80s to the point where the government had to significantly limit and regulate birth. By the time the 90s came around the system currently in place existed.

In the Soviet Union, there is less of an issue around overpopulation, and drugs and germ engineering has been used to improve the Soviet gene-stock, contributing to the Nova-Stalinist vision of New Soviet Man. Obviously, the best germ stocks are available only to those proven of ideological firmness, so a class system of sorts has emerged, of generations of loyal Communists entrenched through genetic excellence. The Soviets have also maintained policies which encourage high birth-rates so the population is about 370 million.

In China, where overpopulation was even more of a problem than in the US, the commune system was designed to be system in which children were collectively brought up by the whole community. This way, fewer children would be born, and the Chinese could reduce the population to a manageable level. The population is now 700 million and still falling. Children born into this system are firmly ideologically indoctrinated with a system of pheronomes introduced in the early 90s producing model citizens. Physical and mental training are used to raise these model citizens into excellent physical specimens.

In order to compete with the Chinese and Soviets, the Americans used their careful management of population to selectively breed to a certain extent. In the early 90s, with simultaneous break-throughs in germ splicing in Russia and a new generation of Absolutely Collectivised Chinese being born better and stronger and richer than their forebears, American government and business leaders had to come up with a challenge. So the Mother America Programme was set up in co-operation with certain corporations. It began as a program on colorvision in which families were awarded prizes for the excellence of their babies. Families were separated into three classes. Natural families with no limitation on family sizes were in one class. Two-baby families were in another class, and babies produced by insemination were in another. Winners of each class were categorised as All-American.

But the Mother America Programme went above and beyond that. Never before had a mother and a father each been specifically identified and paired. The two parents would never meet of course, but according to SCIENCE, their genes matched best (and they would match the American apple pie propaganda) and their child would be called the Boy America. Only one child born by this programme would be born every year, a boy in the first year (1991) and a Girl America the next and so on. Capitalist competition had been introduced to the gene market.

Due to contraception and differing social attitudes, sex has become rather casual and with it gender roles have loosened. Single working mothers aren't looked down upon at all. However there is something of a hankering for the Old Days of Mom and Apple Pie, which in a world of competitive business with women not afraid to speak their mind (see the first Mother America). Racial attitudes are also more liberal than in our world as many are parents of children with very skin tones to their own due to insemination.

Outside the world of selective breeding, there are other great human achievements. Space exploration for one. Mankind reached Mars in 1991, and it was America which planted the flag. Since then there has been an explosion outwards as stations by all manner of nations have been established on the Moon and Mars and in the asteroids. Space explorers are hailed as heroes in most nations, though ironically few are allowed to contribute to the gene stock in American society due to cosmic waves damaging their sex cells.

As the ideological conflicts have faded away and the Super Powers focus more on enriching themselves and looking good, so the lesser powers have been able to make themselves more individual. The nations of Latin America are in the United States sphere but they aren't clients by a long way. COMECON has trade pacts with the European Co-operative, and the Commonwealth of Nations also has trade agreements with that body which allow Britain to overlap her commitments. There is less of a definable Third World, and the world is on average much wealthier. The world is also more unequal. In many former Soviet clients, germ splicing caught on amongst elites and now dictators can hold power over generations rather stably simply because their progeny is genetically superior to the great mass of people. Similarly in Western states, American methods of selective breeding have caught on and there can be fairly stark divides in society between those who have the genetic suitability to sire more young, and those limited. Britain is an example of an extremely class divided society.